There’s lots of hay being made by the usual romminesque flaming bloggers, some news outlets and the like, over my disagreement with the way data was handled in one of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) papers, the only one I got to review before yesterday’s media blitz. Apparently I’m not allowed to point out errors, and BEST isn’t allowed to correct any before release, such as the six incorrectly spelled citations of the Fall et al 2011 paper I pointed out to BEST a week earlier, which they couldn’t be bothered to fix.
And then there’s the issue of doing a 60 year study on siting, when we only guaranteed 30. Even NOAA’s Menne et al paper knew not to make such a stupid mistake. Making up data where there isn’t any is what got Steig et al into trouble in Antarctica and they got called on it by Jeff Id, Steve McIntyre, and Ryan O’Donnell in a follow on peer-reviewed paper.
But I think it’s useful to note here (since I know some other bloggers will just say “denier” and be done with it) what I do in fact agree with and accept, and what I don’t. They wanted an instant answer, before I had a chance even to read the other three papers. Media outlets were asking for my opinion even before the release of these papers, and I stated clearly that I had only seen one and I couldn’t yet comment on the others. That didn’t matter, they lumped that opinion on one I had seen into an opinion on all four.
What I agree with:
- The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention – it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question.
- From the BEST press release “Global Warming is real” …see point one. Notably, “man-made global warming” was not mentioned by BEST, and in their findings they point out explicitly they didn’t address this issue as they state in this screencap from the press release:
- As David Whitehouse wrote: “The researchers find a strong correlation between North Atlantic temperature cycles lasting decades, and the global land surface temperature. They admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the “human component of global warming may be somewhat overstated.”. Here’s a screencap from that paper:
- The unique BEST methodology has promise. The scalpel method used to deal with station discontinuity was a good idea and I’ve said so before.
- The findings of the BEST global surface analysis match the finding of other global temperature metrics. This isn’t surprising, as much of the same base raw data was used. There’s a myth that NASA GISS, HadCRUT, NOAA’s, and now Berkeley’s source data are independent of one another. That’s not completely true. They share a lot of common data from GHCN, administered by NOAA’s National Climatic Data. So it isn’t surprising at all they would match.
What I disagree with:
1. The way they dealt with my surfacestation data in analysis was flat-out wrong, and I told them so days ahead of this release. They offered no correction, nor even an acknowledgement of the issue. The issue has to do with the 60 year period they used. Both peer-reviewed papers on the subject, Menne et al 2010, and Fall et al 2011 used 30 year periods. This is a key point because nobody knows (not me, not NOAA, not BEST) what the siting quality of weather stations was 30-60 years ago. Basically they did an analysis on a time period for which metadata doesn’t exist. I’ve asked simply for them to do it on 30 years as the two peer reviewed papers did, an apples-to-apples comparison. If they do that and the result is the same, I’m satisfied. OTOH, they may find something new when done correctly, we all deserve that opportunity.
Willis Eschenbach points out this quote from the paper:
We evaluate the effect of very-rural station siting on the global average by applying the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature averaging procedure to the very-rural stations. By comparing the resulting average to that obtained by using all the stations we can quantify the impact of selecting sites not subject to urbanization on the estimated average land temperature.
He adds: That seems crazy to me. Why compare the worst stations to all stations? Why not compare them to the best stations?
2. The UHI study seems a bit strange in its approach. They write in their press release that:
They didn’t adequately deal with that 1% in my opinion, by doing a proper area weighting. And what percentage of weather stations were in that 1%? While they do have some evidence of the use of a “kriging” technique, I’m not certain is has been done properly. The fact that 33% of the sites show a cooling is certainly cause for a much harder look at this. That’s not something you can easily dismiss, though they attempt to. This will hopefully get sorted out in peer review.
3. The release method they chose, of having a media blitzkrieg of press release and writers at major MSM outlets lined up beforehand is beyond the pale. While I agree with Dr. Muller’s contention that circulating papers among colleagues for wider peer review is an excellent idea, what they did with the planned and coordinated (and make no mistake it was coordinated for October 20th, Liz Muller told me this herself) is not only self-serving grandiosity, but quite risky if peer review comes up with a different answer.
The rush to judgment they fomented before science had a chance to speak is worse than anything I’ve ever seen, and from my early dealings with them, I can say that I had no idea they would do this, otherwise I would not have embraced them so openly. A lie of omission is still a lie, and I feel that I was not given the true intentions of the BEST group when I met with them.
So there you have it, I accept their papers, and many of their findings, but disagree with some methods and results as is my right. It will be interesting to see if these survive peer review significantly unchanged.
One thing we can count on that WON’T normally be transparent is the peer review process, and if that process includes members of the “team” who are well versed enough to but already embracing the results such as Phil Jones has done, then the peer review will turn into “pal review”.
The solution is to make the names of the reviewers known. Since Dr. Muller and BEST wish to upset the apple cart of scientific procedure, putting public review before peer review, and because they make this self-assured and most extraordinary claim in their press release:
That’s some claim. Four papers that have not been peer-reviewed yet, and they KNOW they’ll pass peer review and will be in the next IPCC report? Is it just me or does that sound rigged? Or, is it just the product of an overactive ego on the part of the BEST group?
I say, if BEST and Dr. Muller truly believes in a transparent approach, as they state on the front page of their website…
…let’s make the peer review process transparent so that there is no possibility of “pal review” to ramrod this through without proper science being done.
Since Dr. Muller claims this is “one of the most important questions ever”, let’s deal with it in an open a manner as possible. Ensuring that these four papers get a thorough and non-partisan peer review is the best way to get the question answered.
Had they not made the claim I highlighted above of it passing peer review and being in the next IPCC report before any of that even is decided, I would never think to ask for this. That overconfident claim is a real cause for concern, especially when the media blitzkrieg they launched makes it difficult for any potential review scientists to not notice and read these studies and news stories ahead of time, thus becoming biased by media coverage.
We can’t just move the “jury pool” of scientists to the next county to ensure a fair trial now that is been blathered worldwide can we?
Vote on it:
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[snip]
Funny the comments that get through the moderation policy, isn’t it?
And yet Anthony will use the excuse of a fake email address in order not to publish dissenting opinions.
[Reply: Use a legitimate email address and there’s no problem. Suggest you read the site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
This post is all about back peddling, going back on your own words and being unable to admit you are utterly wrong. Add all that up and try to find a word to describe it and one quickly comes to mind: [snip].
Best Science Blog? In the comedy category perhaps.
REPLY: Well if you believe what you say, have the courage to stand behind your words by putting your name to it as I do, otherwise shut up. As for the offending comment, I didn’t see it as I don’t approve all comments. But it is removed now. Will you argue equally vociferously to have the post removed where I’m accused of raping farm animals for daring to ask for a correction in a libelous article, or does that sort of thing seem acceptable to you? – Anthony
Glen Tamblyn: Do you think that looking at a few stations provides any relevent information.
Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do. On-site developments can swamp larger scale trends, from global all the way down to UHIs. Observed anomaly trends can come from any level; the immediate vicinity is surely relevant. Or perhaps you think that not looking provides some relevant information? : > )
This might be picking at nits, but I question the extent to which bias is absent from the BEST group’s methods and results when they saw fit to put this sentence in the “Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process” paper:
“As described in the preceding section, the existing global temperature analysis groups use
a variety of well-motivated algorithms to generate a history of global temperature change.”
Why include “well-motivated”?
Why do the temperature anomalies look to be higher now than in the 1930s?
I don’t think you need to worry about “pal review”. The papers are being reviewed all over the world as we write. When the published versions appear, everyone who wants to will be able to see the differences between the submitted and published versions.
UHI should be called thermal emissions as the use of the word island suggests that heat goes directly into space and there is no green house effect at all. These numbers if you use watts/m2 for certain countries are very significant in theory. I worked them out for some countries based on energy use creating 70% as thermal emissions for 2009 as follows USA 0.20 watts/m2 China 0.19watts/m2 France 0.38watts/m2 Germany 0.74watts/m2 United Kingdom 0.75watts/m2. Another point the graph shown above ends in 2006 and is 10 year moving average so as not to show relatively stable temperatures for the last 12 years or so.
Matt says:
October 22, 2011 at 1:01 am
‘and this is what Muller has for your peer review / pre-print criticism:
‘When contacted by The Reg, Muller responded in an email that he believes scientific papers should be widely circulated in “preprint” form before their publication. “It has been traditional throughout most of my career to distribute preprints around the world,” he writes. “In fact, most universities and laboratories had ‘preprint libraries’ where you could frequently find colleagues.”’
Utter and total BS. Peer Review serves the journal editor and no one else. Authors are entirely welcome to circulate articles to colleagues apart from peer review. But leaking information about your work to the press when it is in peer review earns you the title Loose Cannon on Deck. Muller seems to have earned that title more than once.
EFS_Junior says:
October 22, 2011 at 12:43 am
“So now we’re back on the Conspiracy Train? That didn’t take too long, now did it?”
Judith Curry calls for disbanding the IPCC. Is she on the conspiracy train? You do not have to believe in a conspiracy to believe that a group of people are behaving as if they were conspirators. It is called GroupThink.
Anthony, accepting to your applied caveats, do you accept the BEST results? Would you be anymore accepting if a follow-up analysis limited itself to your preferred 30-year period? Equally, will you be as resolute in your criticisms of skeptic ‘revelations’ that get pumped up into the mainstream, sans peer-review?
@ur momisugly peetee, are you unable to read and comphrehend this post? All your questions about BEST acceptance and time periods are answered. You’re just looking for a money quote so you can post it elsewhere sorry chump, seen your kind too many times. Go fish.
The issue with peer review is that they told me (when they asked for my data) that they’d be going through the standard peer review process, No mention of media blitzkrieg. If I knew they were going to do that, I would not have agreed to share my data.
A lie of omission is still a lie.
In case noone else is getting the charts, this is a different link to BEST monthly anomaly.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/berkeleymonthlylandanom.png/
I’m also starting to wonder how NCDC, GISS and Crutemp can come up with such stable Land temperature data month-to-month when BEST, using 39,000 datapoints, has such high variability from month-to-month.
BEST temperatures vary from Crutemp3 by +/- 0.5C and from the NOAA by +/- 0.4C on a consistent basis month to month. They also have a higher trend than either dataset.
(It also looks like BEST has an error in their database for April, 2010 which should be +1.035C rather than -1.035C – it is such an outlier compared to the trend and to other datasets – that means all their moving averages have to recalculated as well).
If the 1/3 of the stations that are showing cooling are all very-rural it could be argued that mankind is saving the planet by burning fossil fuels.
Elmer says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:38 am
“If the 1/3 of the stations that are showing cooling are all very-rural it could be argued that mankind is saving the planet by burning fossil fuels.”
The supreme arrogance that isolates Warmista from all common experience also makes their language meaningless. For example, Warmista might claim that Rural stations show the most warming of all and, in addition, that fact shows that the effects of UHI are not important. What they do not tell you is that the Rural stations show the most warming because they are well into the process of becoming Urban stations. The same holds for Very-Rural stations that are in the process of becoming Rural stations. Their language is designed to defeat attempts to use empirical observations in criticism of their conclusions.
The error bars on the reconstruction seem implausibly tight for an honest ‘instrumental’ approach instead of a ‘proxy’ approach.
Saying that a thermometer in a field is representative of the true energy content of the meter of surface air across the entire gridcell is an assumption, and the stated error bars are ludicrous. It’s fine when you call it a proxy – “Hey, this is all we have.”
But “instrumental” is claiming some skill at -actually- measuring the quantity of interest. And calculating and propagating errors from actual calibrations of instruments. These instruments are generally calibrated as -point-source-observers-. I have never yet seen one calibrated as a -gridcell- observer.
Coming at this a different way:
Pick a tiny gridcell that’s -far- smaller than those typical of these reconstructions: 10km x 10km. From where I sit, that would include a long windy ridgeline, a couple of hills, two streams and a large flat area near a lake. Even correcting for elevation differences, these locations do -not- have the same temperatures – a three-degree temperature difference exceeds the ‘0.1C’ error limit on the physical thermometers by more than an order of magnitude. “CRN1” siting and instrumentation at these locations wouldn’t change that. The “microsite” issues and the (separate) UHI issue are -not- the same problem as converting a point measurement into an estimate for a distributed quantity.
otter17 says:
October 22, 2011 at 8:19 am
“If you don’t like their results, you can use the same base data and come up with your own code when the stuff is published.”
The claim that they are alarmists is not a claim about their (preliminary) results. It is a claim about their decisions to depart from the peer review process, violate Anthony’s trust, and go to the media with their non-peer-reviewed results. Muller is grandstanding. Any questions?
Septic Matthew says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:16 am
“I don’t think you need to worry about “pal review”. The papers are being reviewed all over the world as we write. When the published versions appear, everyone who wants to will be able to see the differences between the submitted and published versions.”
In the meantime, Muller and friends are happily spreading claims that might prove to be false in a matter of days when peer review is finished. They have succeeded in the media handsomely.
You do not understand peer review. It serves journal editors and has no other function whatsoever. You are confusing peer review and the general discussion of new papers.
Muller himself seems to accept that the surface temperature record as a whole is suspect when he says “it is nonetheless possible to find long time series with both positive and negative trends from all portions of the United States.”
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/kansas-temperature-trend-updatemuller-confirms-there-is-a-problem/
“The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention – it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question.”
Yes. Yes, it was…including by you. Stop trying to whitewash history, and you might start getting some of the respect you think you’ve earned.
UC Berkeley got a 500 million dollar grant for green energy from British Petroleum. BP is owned by the English Crown/Rothschilds banking consortium. The Koch brothers got ‘outbid’.
UC berkeley most of their research money comes from the Government and UC Berkeley is once again out pushing their massively flawed nuclear reactor technology to the world among other scams they have going funded for by the taxpayers.
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml
it is estimated the carbon trading market is worth 2 trillion a year it they can make it ‘stick’- CO2 taxes- with falsified, bad science.
Prince Charles, Sir Albert Gore, Barron rothschild, etc are the principals in setting the trading exchange up for Carbon to be based out of london and have hedge funds to invest in green energy as well. prince charles is sort of the behind the scenes mover on ‘green’ energy. ( and we all see how ‘green’ fukushima is) and al gore is the notorious ‘science’ front man even though he was a liberal arts major and a C law school student/graduate.
englands north sea is in decline and all of england is financed based or service based around finance. the english invented the CDS what is currently being used to collapse/manipulate global markets and that market is coming under strict regulation in the USA and Europe.
this global warming/carbon tax is their ‘next’ act in England. And not only that if they can levy Carbon trading and carbon taxes globally many of Al Gore (prince Charles 12 th cousin) and Rothschiilds ‘green’ energy firms will benefit as well.
After Gore let his literal cousin, W. Bush, who is on the record admitting he is a relative of Prince Charles as well, like Al Gore, take the election in 2000, and some say the Bush family bribed the supreme court to do so. Al Gore was put on the BOD of directors of Kleiner perkins, the big Silicon Valley , by the City of London, as ‘compensation’ and got 1 dollar series A google stock which made him a billionaire and front man for the anthropogenic global warming hoax.
All of this centers around an ethos the English Royals postulated by Disraeli that the English Elites should oppress the middle class with heavy taxes and send that money down to lower classes and use that to eliminate competitors coming out of the middle class to challenge the english elites.
it is one of the greatest hoaxes of the world by the English royals that their empire has been disbanded. the PM of England must kneel and swear and oath of loyalty to the English crown and kiss the Crowns rings to take power. The English queen can dissolve parliament in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the UK at any time. The PM of the UK and Finance minister must met weekly with the English crown’s privy council (bankers and house of lord types) to advise them and receive advise.
the USA was ‘recaptured’ by traitorous elite families with ties to the English crown like the Al Gore and Bush family by the Creation of the Federal Reserve Bank -See Dr. Murray Rothbards book, ‘the case against the Fed’ and his history of banking it the USA. The Fed is privately owned and its owners are all part of the City of London, ‘Royal’ banking cartel.
no one disputes that by virtue of Obama’s father being an English Citizen at the time of Obama’s birth he is dual English-USA citizen. Obama must know who has the ‘power’ as his first meeting was not to Canada as is tradition for American presidents but to England for private meetings with Prince Charles, and his banking pals.
Queen Elizabeth is retired even though she has not told her people and prince Charles is heading the English monarchy day to day and his father was head of the WWF, a highly political outfit for stealing indigenous land rights. It looks like the Queen and Prince Phillip have an early onset of Alzheimers as their memory is shot. The Queen has announced she is on her last world tour. English Commonwealth countries control the majority of the votes at the UN.
This anthropogenic global warming hoax like the peak oil theory hoax and has ties right to MI6 and the English crown.
The English empire is still growing they just took ‘libya’ back again. Al Quaddafi was put in power by the English, is a graduate of their military schools and was partnered with Prince Andrew and Nate Rothschilds and Tony Baliar, and when he stopped cooperating with the Crowns NWO agenda in Libya the English crown lead the effort to war to remove him. The English created the modern nation of Libya and they have always been in ‘charge’ and in business with its various leaders since all that oil was discovered there.
I used to work as a petroleum engineer for a large multinational that is where you sort of pick up how the world really works. I’ve always favored, LNG, clean coal, and solar over oil , and oil by far to nuclear power. I studied nuclear engineering at UC and thought it was a ‘scam’ to advance the nuclear power goals of the military. there is no way a nuclear power plant can be called ‘clean’ energy and no way any of the designs can be really fail safe or fool proof.
when i was last in the oil industry these same people in london were trying to blame ‘global’ cooling for the worlds ills. it seems every generation they change the story and no one remembers what lies London told the last generation. i do.
Theo Goodwin says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:55 am
“The claim that they are alarmists is not a claim about their (preliminary) results. It is a claim about their decisions to depart from the peer review process, violate Anthony’s trust, and go to the media with their non-peer-reviewed results. Muller is grandstanding. Any questions?”
Still, if BEST can be proven wrong after the publication of their method/code or whatever, that would make Muller look all the more incorrect. Now, not to say that this pre-release is kosher in the climate science realm, but if Dr. Muller is used to doing it in the physics realm, why demonize him as an alarmist? He may have made an honest mistake doing what he is used to doing for his physics results/publications.
Theo Goodwin:You do not understand peer review. It serves journal editors and has no other function whatsoever. You are confusing peer review and the general discussion of new papers.
Let me try again: When the published versions appear, everyone who wants to will be able to see the differences between the submitted and published versions.
Here’s another reason I can’t buy the belated assertion the skeptics “knew all along” the temperature reconstructions were robust, and credible. And that they merely have problems with attribution.
This belated assertion is contradicted by what has been said routinely – and recently – on skeptics blogs.
AW himself said this in March on his own blog. He stated he didn’t know if the Berkley results would show warming or cooling. This clearly suggests uncertainty about the trend of global surface temperature. And he implied the NOAA and GISS temperture records were all mucked up….”madness” was his word. How, therefore, can it be true that skeptics “knew all along” that the temperature records were credible and robust- as now confirmed by a prominent Berkley team that was sympathetic to skeptics; indeed had their support?
**********************************************************************************************************************
AW on the Berkley Project: “But here’s the thing: I have no certainty nor expectations in the results. Like them, I have no idea whether it will show more warming, about the same, no change, or cooling in the land surface temperature record they are analyzing….. However, I can say that having examined the method, on the surface it seems to be a novel approach that handles many of the issues that have been raised.”
“And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. ….. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren’t any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell.”
If any of those advocating extreme dangerous warming would like to discuss the paleoclimatic record and current observations rather than name calling I am more than willing.
I would be curious, “What is the scientific case that the judges will be asked to decide on?”
Milankovitch’s theory does not explain the paleoclimatic record. The paleoclimatic record shows evidence of a massive serial pseudo cyclic forcing function. It is this unknown mechanism that drives the glacial/interglacial cycle.
With Milankovitch’s mechanism and assumed positive amplification planetary temperature should cyclically track insolation at the critical 60 degree North. That is not observed. Interglacials periods end abruptly not gradually. There are at least six fundamental observations that cannot be explained by Milankovitch’s theory.
Detailed analysis of top of atmosphere radiation balance in response to ocean temperature changes shows the planet’s feedback response to a change in forcing is negative not positive. The planet resists temperature changes rather than amplifies them. The glacial/interglacial cycle is caused by what causes the abrupt climate change events in the paleoclimatic record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
1) 100,000-year problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem
2) 400,000-year problem
3) Stage 5 problem
4) Effect exceeds cause
5) The transition problem
6) Identifying dominant factor
http://www.agu.org/pubs/sample_articles/cr/2002PA000791/2002PA000791.pdf
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid.
The event at 8200 ka is the most striking sudden cooling event during the Holocene, giving widespread cool, dry conditions lasting perhaps 200 years before a rapid return to climates warmer and generally moister than the present. This event is clearly detectable in the Greenland ice cores, where the cooling seems to have been about half-way as severe as the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene difference (Alley et al., 1997; Mayewski et al., 1997). No detailed assessment of the speed of change involved seems to have been made within the literature (though it should be possible to make such assessments from the ice core record), but the short duration of these events at least suggests changes that took only a few decades or less to occur.
I have a serious question and maybe someone could help me.
If BEST claims 1/3 of the stations show cooling and 2/3 warming, have they included the mass elimination of sites by 2/3, like Ross McKitrick shows here?
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/nvst.html
In original from GISS here (Fig. 2 at the top)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
I’m just wondering about the “1/3” and “2/3” coincidence.
Dr. Muller’s job was to provide the results for which Charles and David Koch so well paid him.
Dr. Muller’s job was NOT – I repeat NOT – to think for himself.
Until we Americans learn to follow our job creators without question, we will never truly be a free nation.
Global warming does not exist. Climate change does not exist. Only government impedes right and just firms from acquiring the rich amounts of oil and natural gas that lie inches beneath the ground all over the United States.
“peter stone says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:53 am
I don’t get this.
How can both of these contradictory positions be true at the same time?”
The beliefs of people that do not believe in CAGW vary. However I do not see any contradiction to believe we are warming due to natural causes since we are coming out of the LIA while at the same time disagreeing with the huge effect man-made CO2 allegedly has.
“For the past two years, skeptics were claiming that the Climategate faux “scandal” and other alleged malfeasences proved a conspiracy of scientists and faked or manipulated data to exaggerate, perhaps even fabricate, the warming trend of the last half century.”
This does not necessarily reflect on BEST or HADCRUT, but may be a reflection of the hockey stick that did away with the MWP thereby exaggerating the “warming trend of the last half century” relative to 1000 AD.